In what work did poet John Keats first employ the term “negative capability”?

By Pamela Landy

In a letter written in December 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas, poet John Keats first referred to “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Keats considered this quality essential to a “Man of Achievement especially in literature.”